Tribute to Old School UO. Will MMORPG's ever be this good again?

I remember being at Babbages looking at this box.  I didn't know what a MMORPG was at the time.  I saw decent graphics(at the time), red dragons, and a horde of treasure chest loot(on the back of the box).  I had to try it!

I was amazed when I logged into UO for the first time.  I had never experienced a full world where everyone running around was a player with so many things to do.  There was lag, unbelievable lag by today's standards, lag that took 15 minutes at times to get from one end of your screen to the other.  There were exploits galore in the early days, bugs that i'd say in some ways added to the gameplay.  It was funny as hell using Earthquake scrolls and dropping everyone on your screen.  Sure you could call this lame, or other variations of the bugs/exploits that were constant in the evolution of Ultima Online.  However the best thing about this game in its early days was the radical change in gameplay after each patch.  There were periods of no delay fireball spam, xbow/bow op'dness, precast, etc. and boy were they enjoyable.  Some of the best video gaminig memories for me come from those days and i've played many many MMORPG"s since.  UO in its early days was just an open world with things to do and no rules put in place as buffers for this or that, where players created their own sense of play.  These days of MMORPG"s we're all guided in everything by rules/buffers so there is less QQ about this or that from non PvP's, sadly UO eventually took this turn

I look at WoW and then i think of Ultima Online.  It makes me realize how limited and one dimensional the PvP WoW is.  In UO, there were so many aspects to the PvP.  There were tradeskills that supported PvP directly which always created constant demand for tradeskill items.  There was housing that essentially gave you an area that was your turf.  There was open PK PvE with full lootiing that gave incentive to PK, and made farming mobs much more dangerous as it should be.  Very lucrative tradeskills such as mining was also very dangerous, as it should've been.  You could purchase multiple houses and play the real estate market.  You could set some of those houses up with vendors.  There were prime real estate spots.  You could play chess/checkers if you want to just hangout at your house, keep, or castle with a buddy and not in the mood to PvE or PvP.  There was factional fighting later on that occured in towns.  There were rares and people who would pay top dollar for them.  There was a website trading board that was ALWAYS active by the minute literally 24/7 and worked very well to sell/buy items you wanted when you were at work for when you got home.  There were just so many things to do in UO it was amazing and each thing enhanced other aspects of the game.  The whole world of UO was connected as well unlike most MMORPG's that have gone the instance route for everything.

I touched on some of the downsides to UO and there were many, server lag was probably its biggest issue.  There were things other players had issues with for example housing overcrowding the landscape.  Many PvE'ers or roleplayers in particular would complain about this, but what i LOVED as a PvP player was going to Chaos shrine where there were a glut of houses that almost formed a maze to PvP around.  It created a unique venue to the rest of the world to PvP in with the LOS of housing and the narrow alleyways in between houses.  Dungeon PvP was also very enjoyable, even if most of it occured right outside the entrances.  I think what i loved most of all that no other mmorpg has been able to replicate was the sense of territory for PK's and PvP groups.  I hung around Destard, my house was near there.  There was a group of PK's when i was building my skills that would always PK me as a nub, since their houses were right outside of the dungeon and it was also theyre territory as well.  Going from constantly being PK'd by these guys as a noob to PK'ing them with the same people i was nub'd up PvE'ing in Destard with was the greatest feeling.  The coolest thing about PvP territory play was i remember one day the Banana Boys, a PK group, showing up around Destard, our turf, in all yellow outfits and we teamed up against them for some epic PvP battles.  None of this was preplanned, it all just naturally happened. 

There were duels, i remember Chaos Shrine being the hotspot in the early UO days where people would come and watch popular players like Ritalin or Perplexus(sp?) or some other person duel.  There were jsut so  many small groups of PK's that had their own alliances and enemies which created a very dangerously unique functioning world, even 3 way battles at times.  Thinking back i really have to wonder if MMORPG's have gone backwards.  No MMORPG to thsi day have created such a dynamic free world that OLD SCHOOL UO was.  These days its sad, actually pitiful, that PvP is based on things such as Arena, /duel accept/decline, and BG's.  Just so completely artificial and preplanned that it takes so much away from the buildup and motivation.

Old School UO died to me after 2-3 years and i blame the Dev's.  There was a mass exodus after precast was removed, and later splitting of the lands.  Roleplayers didnt know how to PvP, pretended they did(Orcs from Catskils LOLz), and called it an exploit because they'd get pwned.   OSI later adopted the same policy towards precast even though it had been in the game for more than a year and a staple of PvP, except they termed it a bug that was never intended.  We(PvP's) argued on the CoB forums, at the time there was direct communication with the Dev's, problem was more than a few of the Dev's were roleplayers that had gone on to work for OSI.  If you had visited the Tavern section of the CoB forums you would have seen this firsthand. 

Sadly what was IMO the best PvP game ever created was nerfed into Carebear land.  The roleplayers wanted their tea parties.  They wanted to walk the lands greeting each other in the middle of the wilderness or a dungeon with their thee's and thou's without fear of dying.  They wanted to be able to kill mobs without fear of PK's.  In the end OSI gave them what they wanted and everything in the game was trivialized. 

This is in memory of OLD SCHOOL UO, the greatest game ever made, which in the end was ruined by Dev's who were very bias based on their own play preferences, that thought they knew everything.  Ironically I see WoW Dev's fitting the same mold. 

PS I came back to UO about a year later and i was amazed at how it had changed for the worse.  It seemed the game had gone completely PvE/Roleplayer based.  It seemed most people cared about pretty'ing up their house than actually fightinig or playing the game.  They took a very cookie cutter approach to classes so it was all about A beats B, B beats C, C beats D, D beats A, etc. which is skillless PvP whre skill choices determines the outcome of fights for the few who were still PvP'ing.  The PvP community was pretty much dead.  I also found it ironic how they reinstituted precast over a year after removing it despite most of us telling them it would ruin PvP if they took it out.  Once they did there was a mass exodus of the PvP community on my server(Chesapeake). 

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